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This article offers some thoughts on Seneca's Medea and especially on lines 905-15 near the end of the play, which are key to understanding the construction of the protagonist's identity throughout the text. They bring to the fore the joint presence of anger and love in the characters psychology and, recurring to elegy as a point of entry, attempt to delineate an intertextual relationship with Ov. Am. 2.18, aiming at evoking the 'ghostly' presence of Ovid's lost Medea. The article falls into two major sections: the first part focuses on distinctive features of Seneca's portrayal of his heroine, like the representation of her intense emotions, the maius-motif, the sophisticated and complex interplay between previous models and the character's poignant self-awareness. The second part revolves around the issue of intertextuality, whereof one specific moment is spotted at a microexegetical level in the epilogue of the play., The character of Medea is often associated, in the collective imagination of modern readers, with the representation of irrational anger, which, leading her to the horrific act of infanticide, becomes [...]

It may be agreed that the character of Medea, one of the most intertextual heroines of the Graeco-Roman literary tradition, is a veritable crucible of the most disparate emotions, as the articles gathered in this issue aim to show. In Seneca's Medea, readers encounter a murderous mother who kills her own children, giving in to destructive anger or, rather, fury. This emotion has been widely and extensively studied both in relation to its Greek model, Euripides' Medea, and in the light of the Stoic view on passions, so that it can be acknowledged as one of the most salient features of the Roman character's emotional profile from a literary and philosophical standpoint. Although both Medeas, while struggling within themselves in their famous monologues, debate whether they should or should not kill their children, Euripides' heroine does not seem to murder them out of anger: she repeatedly claims that a pressing necessity urges her to do so; by contrast, the Senecan Medea lets her anger literally lead the way (ira, qua ducis, sequor; 953). They both describe the filicide they are about to commit as a sacrificial act (compare Eur. Med. 1053‒4: ὅ τ ῳ δὲ μ ὴ / θέμις παρε ῖ ναι το ῖ ς ἐ μο ῖ σι θύμασιν, 'whoever is not permitted to attend my sacrifice' and Sen. Med. 970‒1: uictima manes tuos / placamus ista, 'with this victim we placate / your spirit'), but Seneca's character is pushed towards it by the dreadful hallucinations of the Furies and the shadow of her brother approaching (958‒66), which certainly contributes to heightening the disquieting atmosphere of the play: his Medea ultimately appears as a much 'darker' and bleaker version of the Euripidean counterpart, also emerging as a full-blown villain, by whom readers are both repelled and fascinated. In addition to this, the vocabulary of extreme passions recurring throughout the play and the heights of anger that the Senecan Medea reaches represent some of the most noticeable variations on the Greek model, not to mention a famous portrait of the heroine by the Nurse (382‒96), which strikingly resembles that of the angry man depicted by Seneca in De ira 1.1.3‒5. In these pages, however, instead of focusing on the notorious ira and furor of Seneca's Medea, I intend to concentrate on another and yet quite strongly related emotion: joy. In general, it may be noted that the bodily felt responses brought about by both anger and joy have in common the category of expansion, unlike fear and sadness (or grief), in which there is a tendency towards contraction. To my knowledge, the emotion of joy in Seneca's play has not received much attention thus far, owing perhaps to the fact that, as mentioned, anger literally steals the limelight. Therefore, I will here attempt to delve into this emotion, which appears to characterize Medea's criminal deeds, especially towards the end of the play, with a view to bringing to the fore its nuances and function. Although joy, at first glance, may seem to be extraneous to a tragic plot staging a filicide, since it is usually associated with good or positive events, it will be argued that this emotion (also verging on pleasure) is particularly fitting for the Senecan character, in that it takes a 'perverted' and monstrous form in the play, even coming to distort some concepts central to the Stoic doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ovid's Heroid 14 stands out as being quite different from the other single letters of the collection. Its main oddity lies in the fact that the motif of love appears to be absent and, by contrast, Hypermestra's pietas "overrepresented," a circumstance that has inevitably attracted scholarly attention and solicited interpretive activity. In this paper, I intend to contribute to the debate by adding a further strand of interpretation, one that seeks to set the epistle against the backdrop of some recent historical events, namely Livia Drusilla's marriage to Octavian. I, therefore, suggest that the strangeness of Her. 14 may reside in its being suspended between the fictional world of elegy and the historical frame here delineated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Ibis" by Ovid. It explores the unnoticed intertextuality in the poem and reflects on the narrative device through which the poet cunningly builds and juxtaposes mythic episodes. The author provides a critical interpretation of the poem and offers different meanings behind several curse elements, such as the mother's impure womb, the bath of the newborn and soft meadow of Hymn.

The article presents a criticism and interpretation of Plautus "Bacchides" 884-9, in which the slave Chrysalus threatens to fetch a kitchen utensil to stab the soldier and make him more severely wounded than soricina nenia. The article discusses the articles written to unravel the mystery of confossiorem soricina nenia.

Objectives: to investigate vaccine uptake among pregnant women during the 2nd and 3rd trimester of pregnancy. To describe the factors influencing vaccine uptake during pregnancy, comparing sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of pregnant women who were vaccinated during the 2nd or 3rd trimester with those who were not vaccinated, despite having the indication for vaccination., Design: observational study with a cross-sectional approach and prevalence estimation in the population of women who gave birth in the study period, through record linkages between the ministry information flow Birth assistance certificate, the Regional vaccination register and the Italian flow for SARS-CoV-2 infections., Setting and Participants: the study included all the 4,772 pregnant women living in Trentino (north-east Italy), who were in the 2nd or 3rd trimester of pregnancy between the 5th May 2021 and the 28th February 2022 and who delivered in Trentino., Main Outcome Measures: vaccine uptake among pregnant women during the 2nd and 3rd trimester of pregnancy. Results: 33.3% of pregnant women got vaccinated with at least one dose of vaccine during the 2nd or 3rd trimester of pregnancy. Independent factors associated with vaccine uptake in the 2nd or 3rd trimester were the mother's citizenship, educational level, occupational status and age., Conclusions: the proportion of women who received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy was low. The results are important to start efficient actions to promote vaccination in pregnant women, particularly in the most vulnerable ones (unemployed, foreigners and with a low educational level), who appear to be less vaccinated frequently.